Rahm and a divided city.

I've been thinking more and more lately about social solidarity, and how social faultlines affect a place.

Even if Rahm is re-elected, a good 30-40% of the electorate will hate him rabidly, and he'll preside over a divided city.

I wonder how much of that hatred will seep out into everyday life, in the way people think about the downtown and the more privileged areas.

It can't be pleasant, and I certainly don't think it's going away.

Rahm really doesn't care what other people think, but I do think that people will continue to turn their backs to him and refuse him handshakes the rest of his time in office, if he's somehow re-elected.

Through all the stuff that the Garcia campaign is publicizing, people who disliked Rahm have come to hate him even more, and will respond even more harshly to similar actions in the future, even if they're the same level of magnitude as his prior term in office.

Canvassing comedy:

As I push down a doorbell outside a gate, that very same instant a car alarm goes off down the street, and it makes me jump.

Local (black) Democrat on the GOP 47.

A(n older) (black) (Vietnam vet) guy who I met while canvassing was telling me that he can't stand the 47 GOP Senators who wrote the letter undermining the Iran nuclear weapons negotiations.

"This is about weapons and war and people's lives," he was like.  "This could cost people lives, and they still go ahead and do it."

Then he said that he thought that the New York Post hit it right on the money, to call them all traitors.

"Traitors, that's exactly what they are," he was like.

I've lost any respect I had for David Axelrod.

You know, the campaign for Rahm Emanuel has made me lose any respect I had for David Axelrod.

I had never thought too much about Axelrod, but I guess I had kind of admired him by default b/c of his association with Obama.

Rahm, however, is the worst kind of corrupt politician, who sticks it to the vulnerable like schoolkids and the mentally ill, and then turns around and uses that money as handouts to the wealthy, who give him campaign contributions in turn.

Then, he lies and says he's doing it all to benefit the city, and is able to afford a sizable disinformation campaign to ram his bias through to underinformed voters.

Anyhow, the focus of the Axelrod-directed anti-Garcia campaign is Garcia's competence, and I think it implicitly plays up the fact that he has an accent and is non-white.

Last Friday after chaperoning a student trip, I met a friend for a quick drink, and he was out with a (white) (gay) acquaintance.

We began talking politics - as I shouldn't - and my friend's acquaintance would just parrot the anti-Garcia shit from TV, and no matter how many times I nicely pointed out the great things Garcia had done at multiple levels of politics, the guy was like, "But is he really savvy enough?".

The impression I kept getting is that the ads had played into this guy's racism, and had stoked his underlying emotions that when you really get down to it, any non-white person will never truly be competent.

I said as much to him, and he wasn't happy.

Stepping back, I wonder how much damage Axelrod has done to race relations in the city, through this $30 million racebaiting media blitz.

What a sellout.

And it's even worse that Obama had to endorse Rahm.

He should have sat this one out, and it makes me question his judgment too.

Waitress at an Italian restaurant - bar.

The other weekend last month I went to this strip of Italian restaurant bars a bit WNW of downtown, where I had inconsistently hit up bars before.

At the 2nd one, the bar was empty but the early dinner crowd was just coming in, and as I ordered a beer, the (slightly dark skinned) (middle aged) waitress seemed chatty, so I asked her how she was.

"Okay," she was like.  "I'm still getting over something my preschooler brought home."

"Man," I was like, "The way kids get sick, I'm surprised they're ever well."
"That's because they're developing their immune systems," she was like.  "Seriously, you go to a preschool classroom, and all the kids have sniffles."

From that, I segued the convo and asked her what she thought of the measles stuff.

"Honestly," she was like, "I swear that one day half our fucking country is going to die from some bullshit like that."

After that, we really got along and talked quite a bit.

She said she had worked at the restaurant over ten years, and had learned the hard way to give customers what they want with courtesy and especially with special orders, though you always up charge them for that.

"Even then, sometimes they're not happy," she was like.  "It's like, 'Wait till I meet you on the street, bitch.'"

She also said that she feels very bad for delivery people, and that during a snowstorm she ordered take-out like she never does and the pizza guy finally showed up 2 hours later and the pizza was honestly already getting frozen.

"I gave him ten bucks," she was like.  "I felt so bad."

She also added that you should always give realistic timeline for waiting, though, and she always writes down when she tells people how long the wait was, since sometimes people call back and lie about how long ago they put in a table request.

Great art school student responses.

To start off class like I usually do, I asked them some question about sexual mores among the evangelical communists from the 70s we were studying, and to what degree their behavior matched up with heterosexual monogamy.

One response referenced how a contemporary journalist's narrative mentioned furtive kissing and the like, and said that "[t]he sexual activity seemed to be like horny kids at summer camp with super strict rules."

Then, that same response added, "I think the people involved acted out of self interest and maybe enjoyed breaking the rules."

Another response keyed in to a different aspect of that same journalist's narrative, signs of potential gay behavior - or, as the student put it, "many eyewitness accounts of visitors or former members noting that they saw two men or women starting to kiss in the heat of witnessing."

Another Beautiful Sight: Neighborhood Immigration.

Around that same time, one very cold morning on the commute in to the art school, I apparently just missed a bus, and a (short) (late middle-aged) (hard-living) (white) (townie) woman at the bus stop said as much when I asked her if she'd been waiting long.

Not too long after, an old (Chinese) woman muffled up and with shopping bags shuffles up, and in accented English says hi to the townie woman, and they then spoke a bit about the weather.

I found that wonderful; the neighborhood has a reputation for (white) (lower-class) racism, and it's nice to see that proximity of different kinds of people has led to apparently genuine friendly interactions.